Misery Loves Company...nope. Still not sleeping.

[ElphabaTheGreen]

Long-term sleep deprivation getting you down?

Join us here for and plenty of sympathy.

Ride the mo-fo out or something must be done - the choice is yours.

And remember the First Rule of Sleep Club - do not mention that things are going well or you will PAY.

Ha, ha Lili! I was born up north and used to say tea for dinner but it confuses the southerners so quickly reverted to calling it dinner. How often do you give ibuprofen? I worry about giving it too many days in a row.

I think we've probably given ibuprofen most nights for a week needsweets - these teeth coming through slowly. I also keep calpol handy and give that in the night if needed. However, it's hard to tell if she's waking from being overtired / pain / any other unexplained reason.

Oh, good. I was polite, was I? I'm sure you could sense that what I actually wanted to write was, 'YOU'RE fucking tired? YOU DON'T KNOW YOU'RE ALIIIIIVE!!!' I hate it when sleep topics pop up in Active. I can't tear myself away from taking a peek.

I think I've administered more Calpol and Ibuprofen than food the past few days. He's still alive.

Nothing to add to the dummy dilemma. DS1 refused them outright. DS2 ended my fear that he would be one of those kids with a dummy permanently stuck in his face on the stroke of six months when he decided he wanted nothing more to do with them, at all, ever.

We've gone through phases of loads of Calpol and ibuprofen for teeth as well but I've kind of given up now and decided he just has to tough it out as they didn't actually seem to be helping that much anyway.

Lilipot I (southerner!) raised eyebrows at your ibuprofen and tea suggestion - DS might like that, he seems intrigued by the amount of time he sees me and DH drinking tea. He obviously realises it is Something Important.

I am an addict of sleep threads though most of them leave me totally mystified (drop a nap and your baby will magically sleep for 2 hours in the afternoon? Just make sure you wake him by 4 pm? Er no, that means he'll just do one half-hour sleep per day rather than two...) I do quite often feel like inviting Elph over when I spot a particularly galling one though. I could write a list of responses that are especially irritating on sleep threads...

Any suggestion beginning 'you just...' NO. THERE IS NO 'YOU JUST...' ABOUT IT.

'Newborns do/should sleep all the time'. NO. NOT ALL OF THEM.

Anyone else like to add their pet hates here?

Fratercula "drowsy but awake" is just about the stupidest sleep term i ever heard

DD is either tired/grumpy/hungry and demanding to be fed or actually asleep. there's no inbetween phase! trying to put her down before she is properly asleep just pisses her off and makes her cry.

Pretty much every piece of sleep advice pisses me off at some level because I've tried all of it with failure at every turn.

My perennial rage-inducer, though, is the fuck-tards who think their exemplary parenting skills have anything whatsoever to do with their sleepy children. I have a Rolodex of Hate of MNers who think this way. I never say anything (usually), but a red-mist descends when I see them in any threads, sleep-related or otherwise

Any suggestion beginning 'you just...' NO. THERE IS NO 'YOU JUST...' ABOUT IT.

Haha! So true!

Yes I get pretty peeved at the know-it-all advice dished out regularly by some MNers. You got a sleeper, well done you! Some kids don't sleep well, no matter which sleep training techniques are tried. Also, the presumption that after sleep training the baby is STTN and not waking. This is wrong, the baby is still waking, everyone wakes through the night, they are just not crying out anymore as they have been trained that it is a pointless waste of energy so lay quietly on their own until they drop back off again...... And the idea that crying techniques definitely don't do any harm as the child has grown up and is happy, growing, etc. But how do we know the leaving to cry won't affect the child as an adult? Look at the divorce rates, the amount of depression and other psychological problems. Now I'm not saying leaving a baby to cry and not having their needs met, even if it is a comforting cuddle, has caused this, but I'm not willing to risk it with my kids. I would rather have a few years of sleep deprivation and the extra cuddles! I haven't sleep trained either of my kids, DS2 is coming up 12mo, this time last month he was waking 4 - 6 times. Last night he woke once in 11 hrs. We have changed nothing, just gone to him to comfort and guided him gently to be more independent when he cried for us in the night. I'm glad I haven't given in to the pressure of serious crying sleep training. I'm sure he will get bad again, but I'm happy that he can sleep when the conditions are right...... And he definitely CAN self settle (When the wind is blowing in the right direction...... ) Sorry for the essay!

I too read too many sleep threads! I opened that one you commented on Elph as I was intrigued what EMW was....as in, ooh, I don't think we've had that issue! Oh yes, now I see we have actually.
Different folks perception of what constitutes a bad night is astonishing! I also think there is a big issue with new parents not being properly prepared for normal sleep patterns and this attitude of a "good" baby being a sleeper....that is my pet hate, as I'm sure I've mentioned :-)

On another note, does anyone use Ewan the Sheep? Is it supposed to go in the cot? I think it may help DD a bit, at least as a sleepy time cue. Tonight she kept putting her arm out for something on the bedside table - it was either Ewan or a light! Just don't really want her to learn to press the buttons to put the sound on otherwise it'll be yet another dummy-bunny-Velcro-like distraction!!

I took one look at the cost of Ewan the Dream Sheep and have just used the same 69p white noise app with both of mine. Interestingly, they both needed slightly different hissing noises to knock them out - 'Airconditioner' for DS1 and 'Violet Noise' for DS2. Boob plus white noise of choice directly into the up-facing earhole would take them from shrieking to comatose in seconds in their early colicky months. DS2 still uses white noise all night, although I'm not sure how much effect it has on keeping him asleep for longer stretches. I'm just too scared to get rid of it to find out.

Needsweets my feelings on sleep training were very close to yours. It took me many, many months, during which I almost went under on several occasions with the sleep deprivation, before I felt I was prepared - with support from Ann the magic sleep consultant - to force the issue at all. I guess we are now 'sleep training' DS somewhat, but happily/luckily there has been very little more crying than was going on anyway.

Elph / Lilipot the trouble is there are so many pricey gadgets/bedding things, aren't there, and you can find umpteen reviews where someone swears by them for making their child sleep. By the time I got desperate enough to start investigating these, at least I was healthily sceptical that any of them would make a blind bit of difference to DS. So we invested in very few sleep aids. We used free app 'conch shell' white noise when he was tiny, but it didn't seem to help that much... we finally gave up with it when he was about 4 months, we got fed up of going to bed as though we were living on a beach!

Can I just sneak in and say hi?

I didn't feel I could recently as we actually had a good week. We finally moved Chick to his own room. One night of DH settling him and he dropped from waking every hour to one night waking (plus coming in with us at 6 am). One night, he slept until 4 and then 7 and DD1 was the one who got him up.

Last night, normal service resumed. Up at 1, then 3 until 4.30, then 5.30 when he snoozed until 7 provided I lay very still and didn't remove my nipple.

If anything, I feel even worse today. It was like a week of sleep removed all deprivation stamina.

I agree regarding expectations btw. I think parents are led to believe that if they do things 'right' their baby will gradually drop feeds and then sleep through. With DD1 I really had no idea they would wake other than for feeds (past tiny newborn ) or that they could be up for hours.

Hello, please may I join the thread? DS is 7 months old, and has been waking every 45-70 mins for the last 2 months. He starts the night off in his cot and ends up coming into bed with us around 12/1am. He was EBF until we started weaning him a few weeks ago. I was kind of expecting him to be a crap sleeper because DD (now 3.5) was terrible until I Andrea Grace'd her at 11 months. She then became a bit more reliable but didn't sleep through consistently until she hit 18 months. I'm going back to work in 6 weeks so I'm steeling myself to tackle DS's sleep. Just wanted to be with people who understand what I'm going through!!

Also I was thinking about cranial osteopathy but DH thinks this is bunkum. Has anyone here tried it?

Haven't tried it lucid but been tempted, although dd2 is sooo much happier now than she used to be so even though she's still crap at night I'm bearing up. Her birth was a tad fast and she was very very mucousy afterwards - I've always wondered if it would help with the reflux. We've started weaning now anyway so already that's helping it I think.

An improvement of sorts here in that for the last few days I have been tackling the Cot Nap. I was afraid to start doing it because I knew it would be hard and would involve a lot of effort and abandoning of dc1 to the tellybabysitter while I did it. And it was.
However
Dd2 has taken to it much more quickly than I thought. A dummy helped reduce any crying and now I don't always have to use it (though do need to feed her til she's pretty much asleep if I don't use it). This has been so brilliant and is giving me some much needed head space. I used to have to hold her for 20 minutes before laying her down and now i don't have to do this.

I do however still usually need to resort to swaddling her during at least one night wake up! She is 5. 5 months so it's crazy but it tends to buy me 2 hours, sometimes even more.

Re white noise, I use it too, no way I could ditch it just yet. She's SUCH a light sleeper.

Very true about realistic expectations...and yet so many babies genuinely seem to sleep much more than mine, in the first year at least. I often have said to dh what a different experience early parenthood must be if your baby sleeps. We marvel at how different it must be. No heading into the night full of dread. I recall a friend saying to me, 'oh dc2 was awful, he was 9 weeks before he slept through!'

I mean

?????

Ha ha ha. 9 weeks.

I actually don't mind the 'moaning about much better sleepers' people as much as the 'oh my god you are such a hero, I don' know how you do it' types.

I didn't have a choice. It's not like I picked one from a catalogue.

I know it isn't the same at all, because at some point my child will sleep, but it has made me far more aware of saying absolutely fucking stupid things to people in difficult situations like losing a husband with young children or those with disabled children. If it annoys me and my issue is just sleep, it must make them want to kill someone.

Very true Penguins....I think the subtext is usually 'I don't know how you do it, i wouldn't stand for it' isn't it.

Aunt grilled me about dd2's night habits the other weekend. 'Do you take her into bed?' I mumbled yes, sometimes...'quite right,' she said, 'latch the baby on and then you both drift off and it's perfectly natural!'
Hm yes but not as enjoyable as she makes it sound!

Better than DM though who claims to have ebf 5 kids for a year each without ever cosleeping. I'm pretty sure this can't be true.

Penguins quite right about different circumstances, at least we know this will all (eventually) pass. And I know what you mean about catching up on a bit of sleep and then it feels worse - it's like your body suddenly goes, ah, I remember this, it's good and then things change again.
Elph if the white noise works, go with it! I sometimes have a mini meltdown with DH (I blame it on sleep plus pregnancy hormones) and I think one of those resulted in the Ewan purchase. Expensive for something with slightly creepy eyes, and which turns off after 20 mins! But consoled myself that new baby might benefit from it too.
Lucid welcome!
My only friend whose baby genuinely sleeps through and settles really easily is so tactful when she talks about it and grateful, but not in a smug way at all so I appreciate that.
Night all, I'm steeling myself for the inevitable cry just as soon as I drop off (having an unusually late night having had to do some work at home this evening so brain a bit shocked and struggling to wind down!)

Argh! I've been trying to settle her for 2 hours now..so much for not having to hold her until she's asleep, she's pinged awake each time so far. It's always one step forward...

I do feel so much better reading this thread and knowing I'm not alone!

So to add insult to the existing injury caused by waking up every 45-60 minutes, DS decided that it was time to get up at 0225 and stayed awake until 0434. Normally I can resettle him within 5-10 minutes but not this time. I'm getting really scared at the thought of going back to work now!

lucid We tried cranial-osteopathy. I think it's complete bunkum. Some people swear by it, but I'm convinced that they just had a coincidental improvement in their child's sleep around the same time as they parted with £30+ in the direction of a snake oil salesman, resting their fingers on baby's head and saying they're feeling tension in the liver. Tis bullshit, but then bodies, health and brains are my specialty area, so I am going to be a cracking sceptic.

Greenstone We've only just managed to jib night-long swaddling at eight months old (yes, to those of you who have followed my saga. The swaddle is vanquished!). At the crux of it was DS2's ridiculous startle reflex which has just taken ages to go away, and leads to him being an incredibly light sleeper. I wonder in hindsight if that was part of DS1's issue. I never swaddled him, but he and DS2 are like identical twins in all ways, but for the two year age gap, that that may have been an issue. Could that be what's going on with yours?

YY to having a completely different baby experience if you have a sleeper. A work friend of mine had her first baby about the same time I had DS2. Hers is a sleeper. Her FB is full of photos of her going out at night with friends and trackers for how much weight she's lost with Slimming World. Meanwhile, the thought of leaving the house after 6pm makes me hyperventilate, I barely see anyone but immediate family from one day to the next and my pre-DC size 8-10 body may never be seen again under the pile of carbs and sugar I need to combat the exhaustion. You do think sleepy dust could be distributed a little more equitably between babies so that some of us don't have to take such a hit to quality of life.

But as Penguins has so rightfully pointed out, it's just sleep. It will end. Many have far greater concerns about their DCs.

Elph - I hear you about your friends different experience...I have some friends with babies of same age who go for nights away, evenings out, gym, etc!
The whole experience has also really shown me who my friends are, or at least those who can empathise with how things are - they will come over and visit instead of going out, happy to meet up in daytime instead, and realise I still want to be sociable, just in different ways and at different times. Others have just disappeared when I've not been able to join in on evenings out - I suspect they may think I'm being martyrish and overly precious about having a baby, but life has just changed and I'm just getting on with what I think needs to be done. Fortunately I find DH good company still and we're trying to take the long view and remind ourselves that these phases pass. And we're bloody lucky to have such a funny, happy and healthy little girl.

Blimey its been busy around here!

Elph well done on getting rid of the swaddle! That's a definite milestone!

We didn't do cranial osteopathy but both DDs saw a chiropractor (I was already being treated for SPD). Did bugger all for either of their sleep but helped with latches with both and consequently some of DD2s windiness.

Also no Ewan the sheep - think that came along after DD1 otherwise I probably would have bought it in desperation! I did have a prince lionheart thing that played music but it was crap and stopped working after a few weeks so I managed to return it and get my money back which was a bonus.

Neither of mine were that fussed on just white noise. DD1 eventually loved talking books. DD2 has a sleep cd (think sleep, sleep now baby?) which she likes and DD1 also likes sometimes. I can fall asleep to it too but it drives OH up the wall.

We're still having a bit of a crap time. DD2's having a good go this week - I stupidly said something upthread about improvements didn't I. Well I'm being properly punished for it now! Was really annoyed with myself last night for giving in at 3am and feeding - after an hour and a half of her being awake. She has been sleeping really well after a 5 am feed (till 8 or even 9 sometimes) so my sleep deprived logic was that she might do a decent stretch so I could sleep before having to get up with DD1. Did she heck. She tossed and turned and whimpered for about another half an hour then woke again at 5 howling for milk. Then slept till 9.30 when I had to get up with DD1 at 7.

Its actually been more difficult than I expected being away and sharing a room. Its only been 3 or so months since we moved her into her own room but her wriggling and snuffling has really been keeping me awake - I think I'm just constantly on edge waiting for her to wake up. And now I'm going to have to pay for the night feed. I think I'm going to have to give up all feeds before daylight...

Oh and my view on people with good sleepers and the "if you just..."? If there's any bloody karma out there we are due the best bloody teenagers than can be! Then maybe we can get our revenge...